Abstract
Pioneers of new communication technologies such as Edison and Marconi hoped that one of the major uses of their inventions would be to bring education to the masses. Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC public service concept of broadcasting, emphasized education in his famous triad, summarizing the aims of the BBC: 'to educate, to inform and to entertain'. The biggest markets and returns on capital investment were to be found in providing entertainment, however, and the less regulated broadcasters moved steadily in that direction. Today, broadcasting is firmly fixed in the minds of the public as primarily a means of entertainment.
In the last twenty years, however, the use of radio and TV in education has come back into the limelight. Most striking is the variety of new educational services appearing and the ingenious combinations of old and new technologies. With the new confidence in educational broadcasting, millions of people have gained access to the kind of education they need when they need it.
Broadcast instruction is becoming less a stepchild of educational systems and more often their showcase. The Open University ofBritish television, treated with scepticism when it was given its Royal Charter in 1969, now annually enrols an average of 60,000 students and has awarded nearly 100,000 undergraduate degrees.
The success of the Open University has encouraged adaptations of it in some twenty countries. Educational broadcasting is especially significant for developing countries. The Latin American Federation of Educational Radio (ALER} reports that its fifty or more affiliated systems operating in virtually all countries of the continent have more than one million students in basic education courses and more than fifteen million who are benefitting from educational open broadcasting in agriculture, health and grassroots organizations.
At the same time, the road to today's expertise in educational broadcasting has been littered with costly, frustrating failures. This issue of Trends calls attention to the many potential uses of broadcasting for education and, especially, to the ways that it can be a more effective learning experience for students.
Recommended Citation
(1998)
"Educational Broadcasting,"
Communication Research Trends: Vol. 9:
No.
4, Article 1.
Available at:
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/crt/vol9/iss4/1